Friday, March 09, 2018

Aspects of Lawrence Krauss' alleged sex attacks

In his newest blog post, On Lawrence Krauss, BuzzFeed, And #MeToo, Tommaso Dorigo cited me twice and he probably expects me to cite him, too. ;-) So as you can see, I cited him. But I did not cite him back because it's wrong to mutually cite each other.

He discusses the women's complaints that they've been sexually attacked – or led to uncomfortable situations – by famous men, especially cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. To introduce himself, Tommaso brags that he once analyzed the clothes and underwear of a hot babe named Lisa Randall. You must have read these tedious analyses many times because the Washington Post and all the mainstream media have been repeating Dorigo's views on Randall's underwear for years. In the new blog post, Dorigo prefers the freedom of speech over excessively strong regulations on the sexual misconduct; and he wants you not to see things as black and white. I surely agree.

Dorigo is the Italian man who went to Malta and, when facing an attractive waitress, he demanded t*o f**k on the table. She replied that everybody wanted to f**k on the table. But you know, when you compare guys like Dorigo (or me, for that matter), there is a difference from the likes of Lawrence Krauss:

Dorigo is mostly talking and writing while Lawrence Krauss is acting.

If you're at least slightly sensible, you will surely agree that Krauss is a different league. I sincerely hope – but I am not sure – that Tommaso is sensible in this sense and understands that the accusations against Krauss are ultimately somewhat more serious than Krauss' joke about the Queen and Krauss' nipples.

What's going on? First, who is Lawrence Krauss? Lawrence Krauss is a very good, old-fashioned cosmologist who basically predicted the discovery of the positive cosmological constant in the mid 1990s – the discovery was made in the late 1990s. So he understood the state-of-the-art cosmology really well, and I think he still does, although I wouldn't claim he's quite on the same level of expertise as Stanford's string cosmologists, for example.

But he has made some simple enough contributions that were rather clearly more important than the contributions of many brilliant string cosmologists.

After 2000, he began to rebrand himself as a celebrity. His book about Physics of Star Trek was a good starting point. He turned himself into a Richard Dawkins-style professional atheist and together with Richard Dawkins, they actually went on tours all over the world to wrestle God. He's been a key man in some anti-creationist institute and also joined the despicable alarmist "scientists" who constantly adjust the clock to tell you that it's 5 minutes or 2 minutes before the apocalypse.

There are dozens of TRF blog posts about Krauss. His criticism of the research of string theory or a theory of everything is garbage that is just infinitesimally better than the whining by the main canonical prototypes of Šmoits. In 2014, he visited a film festival in Olomouc, Moravia, Czechia, and was treated as a true hero. Much of what he said (he was also interviewed by the Czech Public TV) was great and many accolades were deserved, something was rubbish.

I've met him several times. I remember a colloquium about religion he once gave at Harvard. The whole event was framed so that the religious people had to feel welcome – I don't know whether it was by his design or the design of the hosts. It looked bizarre to me. Believers are treated as garbage by many semi-institutionalized groups of extreme leftists but during that lecture, they were treated as snowflakes. But there was one detail that is relevant here and that I couldn't forget in those 15 years or so. Krauss said that "he thought that he was a very attractive man". So he reiterated my impression that beauty is often a very subjective quantity and people's perception of it is only weakly correlated with the reality. Couldn't those Case Reserve and Arizona universities buy a mirror for him?

Well, I believe he's a textbook example of the man who thinks about "it" every 50 seconds. And even though I think that this excessive libido was the main cause of his misguided self-evaluation, I think there's really nothing to be jealous of. So my pre-existing impressions lead me to believe that the young women's testimonies, or least some of them, could be accurate. At the same moment, I don't have any hard evidence and the presumption of innocence seems crucial to me. Arizona State University has suspended Mr Krauss and placed him in a male chastity (which prevents him from entering the campus) but it's a paid leave so don't worry he won't have the cash to invite girls to hotels now; other organizations have cut ties with him. In the absence of evidence, I could understand this "presumption of guilt" treatment against a priest or a politician but not a bricklayer or a cosmologist.

Lots of the controversy about his alleged attacks is about the denial and different interpretation of the events and of the denials. So a former girl claims to have been attacked in the hotel room, he was pushing her and her crotch towards the furniture in an effort to initiate rape. Another one's breasts were played with. Krauss denies it. On the other hand, Krauss claims that his former employers have agreed that the accusations have been debunked. The employers deny this claim by Krauss about their denial, and so on, and so on.

There are lots of important details of the events in that hotel room – and several other events (in some of them, Krauss' wife was accused of helping Krauss while he was performing the sexual attack) – that we will almost certainly remain uncertain about if we keep our honesty. But you know, I would say that if there aren't detectable physical implications or traces of that alleged sexual misconduct, the hype is mostly a pile of rubbish just like the so-called MeToo movement in general.

Alleged psychological harm is much less tangible and much less trustworthy. And in average, I think that a woman who is attracting men feels better, and not worse, than a woman who is not attracting men, and as long as she is able to preserve her basic physical integrity, marital status, and the freedom for tomorrow, things are just OK. A woman can feel great with the right man. But I think she can also feel well, in a different way, if she can refuse a man who is not right. And the Western civilization generally gives this power to the women (and men).

In the BuzzFeed story, we read that Ms Melody Hensley was clearly a fan of Lawrence Krauss – an anti-religious hero in her eyes. (If your first name is Melody, you shouldn't be surprised when men who consider themselves playboys want to play you. To be in charge of the situation, she should have changed her name to Valkyrie or at least Bořivoj.) She wanted to be close enough to him. One could argue that the beginning of the article contains evidence that she was obsessed with him, or perhaps in love for him, and for this reason, it would already be very misleading to claim that the relationship was one-sided and only Krauss had a crush on her.

For some reason, she ended up in the hotel room with Lawrence Krauss. I believe that Krauss is straight – well, he may have similar preferences as Jeffrey Epstein whom Krauss defended when the generous philanthropist was in trouble (Do you know what's the name of the sexual deviation when middle-aged and older men find 17-year-old girls attractive? It's called heterosexuality!) – but I would still be afraid of being in the same hotel room with Lawrence Krauss! ;-) OK, so Krauss has probably evaluated – in some way that could look sensible to me if I knew the hypothetical details – that she was keen on him and started to do certain reciprocal steps. But the two people lost their synchronization of consensus at some moment, or Ms Hensley has at least retroactively rewritten the history of consensus so that they became desynchronized.

It's complicated but I am sure that the society simply shouldn't introduce punishments for crimes whose occurrence unavoidably remains a matter of an untestable subjective opinion. If one can't objectively enough prove that the person A did something harmful to person B, A simply shouldn't be punished. When a woman claims that the way how a man checked her out was creepy or psychologically distressful, it's a claim that may have some substance that the woman is really well aware of. But it's equally plausible that it's just some bizarre, overhyped interpretation of mundane enough facts – and it may be completely fabricated with the intent to destroy the man.

The society shouldn't introduce "crimes" that could be abused this easily.

When a woman really feels that the way how a man talks to her or looks at her or touches her is both uncomfortable and involving a sex attack or a preparation for it, she should make it clear. "Dear Dr Krauss, I may be wrong but it seems to me that you're preparing to rape me. Could you please stop?" And I think he will just stop. And if he's just too horny on that moment and he doesn't, then you will have a rather convincing story implying that the famous atheist has raped you. If a woman doesn't say (or do) anything that is at least remotely quasi-equivalent to the sentence starting with "Dear" (in particular, if she doesn't even say "No"), then the claim that she was OK with the events seems defensible.

The laws make it clear that the woman has the right to defend herself against unwelcome romantic interactions. So she has the right to say "No". And she often has the protection against punishments for this "No". So she should trust the laws and the system. If she later says that she didn't say "No" because the man was too powerful, I think she's just bullšiting. Men may be powerful but in countries with the rule of law, the laws, courts, and judges are even more powerful and they would clearly be on the woman's side. In recent years, they're often "too much" on her side. In particular, almost all the unraped women claiming to be #MeToo are just promoting creative hostile interpretations of relatively mundane facts.

The tiny, homeopathic acts that are sometimes considered sexual misconduct are particularly shocking if you compare them with the true, violent, sexually powered attacks by the Muslim men – something that is propagating in Europe. In Sweden, a judge has employed the Sharia Law for the first time. Am Iraqi Muslim man was acquitted after he pushed his wife against furniture, pulled her hair, and hit her face with a shoe. The Sharia Law says that the man has done the right thing because she had "lowly parentage" ;-) and the Swedish court system has enriched itself with this imported argumentation.

Yesterday, an Afghani man stabbed several people in Vienna. It also looked like a crime but the Austrian police has explained that the criminal character of the event was an illusion. In fact, the man stabbed the people because he was in a bad mood so things are OK now. The Sharia Law says that a Muslim who is in a bad mood – and every Muslim must be in a bad mood when surrounded by infidels – may and should stab the people. And even institutions in the relatively anti-immigration Austria are gradually importing this "logic", too.

Fourth-wave feminism (that was around since 2012 and lived in the social media) is gradually being superseded by fifth-wave feminism. Fifth-wave feminists are going to be defined as women who are employed as Muslim men's punching bags and rugs.

It's the contrast – the defense of the two vastly different systems of rules by pretty much the same extreme leftists – that is so shocking to me. The Western men can't even look at 99% of the cross section of a woman while the Muslim immigrants can freely commit any medieval monstrosities you can think of and no one can even criticize them or propose policies to tame their behavior or lower the rate by which the number of these men goes up. And the same "progressive" fanatically impose both of these very different rules.

To summarize, I don't know what has exactly happened. For some reasons, I don't think that Krauss is a Gentleman. However, what has happened to those women could have been reasonably expected and there were reasons to think that this is approximately what they – or at least some of them – wanted. Men are naturally the more active side of these interactions. It has to be so. And nations where the Western men will be stigmatized for 1% of the controversial acts that are tolerated when they're done by the Muslim immigrants will be nations on their path to cultural if not physical suicide.

The BuzzFeed article also tells us that the movement of the left-wing atheist activists is basically splitting to two antagonistic camps: those who are full of the toxic identity politics; and those like Dr Krauss who are uncontrollably horny on top of that. ;-)